[Office Hours] Accessing the user stored in firebase from SpeziAccount

[kkellybonilla]

Related Discussion

Hi! I'm on the Stanford360 team and I'm creating a PatientManager observable class to manage the patient/user. I want to be able to access the Account.details set in the onboarding since it has the user's name/date of birth already; however, I'm struggling to figure out how to access it from the PatientManager class file. I looked through the documentation, but I could only find how to access the Account from SwiftUI files, not regular Swift files.

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[PSchmiedmayer]

Hi @kkellybonilla,
Thank you for your question!

The best way to take advantage of Spezi in this case is to use its module system. You can learn about modules in the Spezi documentation. A Module is a type that conforms to the protocol and is therefore part of the Spezi module management (as most other modules that you have used so far, including Account, and other Spezi modules). Therefore, I would suggest making your PatientManager conform to Module and configuring it in your app:

Tip

Module needs to be placed into the Configuration section of your App to enable and configure it.

Modules have a way to use the @Dependency modifier to access other modules within the same app. Therefore, you can use the Spezi dependency system to access the account in other Spezi modules:

final class PatientManager: Module {
    @Dependency(Account.self)
    private var account

    // ...
}

You can then use EnvironmentAccessible to easily access your module in any SwiftUI view.

[kkellybonilla]

Hi Paul! Unfortunately, I was unable to successfully move forward with this approach. I made my PatientManager conform to Module and I was able to access the Account module. I was accessing the Account module as a part of my PatientManager's initializer, which created a patient using the Account module's details property; however, it would crash because it claimed that the Account module was not yet created by the time my app was creating the PatientManager module.

[PSchmiedmayer]

@kkellybonilla Good follow-up question! Dependencies and other elements are only available after the initialized is called, as noted in the Module documentation, the configure() is the best place to do any lightweight initialization and the Account dependency will be available at this point.

[kkellybonilla]

hm, is there a better way to achieve my goal? because I was struggling with the Account module even with the help of other CS 342 staff

my goal is to create a PatientManager class that manages the patient

class PatientManager {
	var patient: Patient

my Patient model has the following properties:

struct Patient: Identifiable {
	var id = UUID()
	var accountId: String?
	var firstName: String
	var lastName: String
	var dateOfBirth: Date
	var genderIdentity: String?
	var height: Measurement<UnitLength>?
	var weight: Measurement<UnitMass>?

of which accountId, firstName, lastName, dateOfBirth, and genderIdentity are already inside of account.details. Because of this, I want to initialize the PatientManager's patient with the aforementioned properties from account.details. Currently, I've worked around my struggles with the Account module by simply making the patient optional, creating the function getPatient() inside of Stanford360Standard that reads these account details from firebase and creates and returns a Patient with those details, and calling this function. I had initially wanted to call this function in the initializer of PatientManager; however, it would throw an error stating that the Stanford360Standard module is not configured (despite being in the configuration() section as set up by the SpeziTemplateApplication and accessing it inside of PatientManager with the @Dependency macro). Instead, I now call it as a task in the HomeView on the TabView

.task {
			patientManager.patient = try? await standard.getPatient()
		}

I've also made my PatientManager a Module and its patient property observable by marking it with the @Published macro. Unfortunately, it does not update the view with the data it fetches from firebase. I've confirmed that the data is being fetched and saved correctly by printing to the console, but the view is failing to update with the updated patient property of the PatientManager. For more details, I've created a draft PR with these changes.

[kkellybonilla]

Hi @PSchmiedmayer, could you maybe share what it would look like to retrieve the above information by accessing the Account module with the @dependency modifier? I attempted this with @vishnuravi yesterday, but we had an error where the Account module was not finished initializing by the time it was attempting to initialize the PatientManager

[PSchmiedmayer]

@kkellybonilla As noted in the original answer you would need to make your PatientManager conform to Module and initialize it in the Spezi Configuration as linked int the original answer. You can then access it in the SwiftUI environment using EnvironmentAccessible .

As noted in other discussion threads here: You will need to wait until the configure method to access the @Dependency injected modules, you can not access them in the initializer.